Unfortunately, we can’t take the blank Russia SVG map from Wikimedia Commons. First, it doesn’t take into account the latest mergers in 2008 (Irkutsk Oblast + Ust-Orda Buryat Autonomnous Okrug = Irkutsk Oblast, Chita Oblast + Agin-Buryat Autonomous Okrug = Zabaykalsky Krai). Second, the regions aren’t identified in the SVG file by their ISO_3166-2:RU code, but by their concatenated transliterated names. Third, the Federal Service of State Statistics doesn’t publish figures of several regions (like Yamalo-Nenets Autonomnous Okrug) because they fall under the administrative jurisdiction of other federal subjects of Russia (in this case Tyumen Oblast). It means that we have to group these regions together so that they can “inherit” the data visualization from their respective jurisdiction.

You can simply follow Nathan’s blog post and write it yourself, or use mine instead. I wrote it because I am too lazy to rewrite the script each time I want to colorize a map with different parameters.